


gnosis

by Brighid



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-05
Updated: 2012-08-05
Packaged: 2017-11-11 11:39:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/478151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brighid/pseuds/Brighid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jimmy doesn't fit Castiel the way he used to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	gnosis

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Season 4.

Gnosis

Castiel is uneasy in James Novak’s skin.

 

He has always hated the way the meat and sinew of humanity fitted: tight and wet and hot and messy, so very messy, nothing like the fire and aether that is his essence. It is even worse now, living with the stain of James Novak’s grief, the memory of his anguish when Castiel had looked down upon him from his daughter’s eyes, down into a despair so profound it had shaken the very firmament of Castiel’s being. He had seen such a look, once, in the eyes of a mother on a hilltop, watching her son die even as His Son was set free from the cage of bone and marrow that imprisoned Him. Castiel remembers watching her, wondering at her grief in the face of the Miracle, but looking down into James Novak’s face, he thinks perhaps he understands some small measure of it, now.

He feels the memory of that gaze in the silences of the man’s slow-beating heart, tastes it in the rasp and sigh of each breath.  
   
He is … shamed by it. What is worse is that he doesn’t understand how to parse these … feelings, isn’t sure how to bring them into His Light and His Word and make sense of it. And that has always been the one thing angels have never lacked: certainty.

So now Castiel walks through the streets of men and does not look in the windows or the glasses or even the puddles on the stained pavement, because he does not think he could withstand what he would see there, in James Novak’s eyes.

Nor does he look into Dean’s Winchester’s angry, weary gaze. Dean Winchester, whom they had pulled from the pit only after it suited them, whom they let carry a burden more than any mortal son should have to bear. He looks sidewise and averts his face because he knows if he looks, he might see his own reflection, and he cannot bear that, either.

 

 


End file.
